


Storm Chaser

by remembertowrite



Series: Monsoon Season [2]
Category: The Black Tapes Podcast
Genre: Comfort/Angst, Episode Tag: 204 Voices Carry, F/M, Morning After, Tumblr Prompt, Warnings: swearing & adult themes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-31
Updated: 2016-03-31
Packaged: 2018-05-30 06:34:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6412891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/remembertowrite/pseuds/remembertowrite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's 4:43 in the morning and Alex hasn't slept. (It might have something to do with the man slumbering in her bed.)</p><p>Based off the prompt, "We're not just friends and you know it." The second piece in a series, but works on its own as a self-contained story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Storm Chaser

**Author's Note:**

  * For [E_Salvatore](https://archiveofourown.org/users/E_Salvatore/gifts).



> Set in the early morning after Natural Disaster. Originally posted on [my Tumblr](http://surely-you-jess.tumblr.com/post/141826601258/if-youre-still-taking-prompts-5-were-not-just) on March 28, 2016. Based on a Tumblr prompt from E_Salvatore: "We're not just friends and you fucking know it."

There’s something surreal in the inky blackness of her ceiling, something that wasn’t there a few hours ago. Colors streak across her vision like covert military aircraft cowering under tales of UFOs lighting up the sky. The soft hiss of the radiator as it spits out warm air and the dribbling of water through the looped pipes give a sense of lying out in a clearing in the woods, bare back to the grubbiness of the soil, trees swaying in silent witness. She’s at the mercy of the elements out here, naked to the chill of the unexplored woods. 

The air is humid and heavy with a scent of disturbance—an invading mold, perhaps, or a new predator stalking low through the brush.

She turns her attentions from the ceiling to the side of the bed normally reserved for a ghost. The planes of the predator’s back shift with each of his breaths; his sharp shoulder blades stretch apart and collapse toward each other again in rhythmic slumber. He’s facing away from her, lying on his side, so he blocks out the red blink of her digital alarm clock.

It was foolish to think that company would make it easier to stay asleep. Not that she’d planned for the pleasure of his specific company taking up half her bed (hogging all of the blankets). Her ceiling has been her only steadfast companion in her waking hours this early morning.

She sits up in the bed, careful not to shift too much to wake her sleeping companion. (Is that the right word? Is that what he is?) She swings her bare legs over the edge, toes curling upon impact with the cold hardwood floor, and she stands up, fumbling for the wall in her blindness, ignoring the colors sparking in her peripheral vision.

She should invest in a night light. Maybe that would keep the visions away.

The stretch from the bedroom to the kitchen is a black labyrinth she fumbles her way through, fingertips trailing along the chipped paint of the walls, until she finds the light switch above the sink and prays for it to please, _please_ not be the switch for the garbage disposal.

She takes a chance, and the overhead light of the small kitchen turns on, flooding the eerie darkness of her apartment with the comforting buzz of the old lighting fixture. She should talk to the landlady about replacing it for something more modern. Something more tasteful.

It’s not as if she doesn’t have the time, what with the six-week suspension from work. Paul hadn’t put it in as many words, but she is nothing if not perceptive—a trait she’s been cursed with that has nonetheless served her well in her work.

The clock on the microwave announces that it’s 4:43 a.m., a respectful enough time to count as waking up for the morning, instead of a restless pacing in the middle of the night. The linoleum is cold underfoot, and the chill of the still air bites at her bare legs. She curls into the oversize tee shirt and puts the kettle on. She hopes the clicking of the gas stove as she waits for a burner to catch fire won’t wake Strand in the bedroom.

While the somehow soothing bubble of boiling water fills the muffled chamber of the kettle, she adds two scoops of pre-ground coffee to the French press. It was a present from her mother, given with some ridiculous sentiment about all cosmopolitan Seattleites being too good for a standard plebeian coffeemaker.

Her ear catches a creak in the floorboards—she’s not as stealthy as she’d imagined—so she adds two more scoops and hopes Strand likes hazelnut.

The kettle whistles its catcall at her backside (tee shirt and underwear, not exactly the most respectable outfit she has), and stops its harassment only when Strand moves it over to the next burner. His towering presence fills her tiny kitchen, and the part of his disheveled hair sticking up in the back almost scratches the ceiling. Humans shouldn’t be allowed to grow over six feet. He’s just too tall. There’s just too _much_ of him.

 _It wasn’t a problem last night_ , a voice in her head whispers through a smirk.

She beholds the sight of Strand in ratty sweatpants and a Mariners shirt (the only remnants of her last boyfriend), and it _does_ something to her, something that no clothing that old should.

“You’re up early,” he observes, one hand tussling his hair. Somewhere in the wild unkemptness of his facial hair and the raggedness of his clothing, she recognizes how such a stern man might have been as a parent and husband. She can see it clearly, the vulnerability and the weariness, how weakly _human_ he can be.

“Couldn’t sleep,” she mutters, bringing the French press over to the counter top nearest the stove. She reaches past his arm for the kettle to mix water into the coffee grounds. She taps the spoon on the side of the press, setting a timer for four minutes on the oven. (“Four minutes exactly, Alex!” her mother had advised. “You have to make it right.”)

He sighs in that uniquely Strand way. “A common occurrence?”

“Enough that Paul and Terry noticed,” she admits, avoiding his line of eyesight. They’d discussed this last night. Maybe it got lost in translation, or in the haze of other, more distracting, actions.

She flees to the living room, not quite ready to break into the discussion they so desperately need to have. He’s too gentle with her this morning, cares enough to actually ask after her well-being, and it’s all too much. Yesterday he was ready to sue for wiretapping; today he’s trailing after her through her apartment, not the least bit distracted by her immodest lack of pants.

She finds her jeans from the night before pooled under the coffee table, so she pulls them on, trying her best to ignore his probing gaze. He sees too much, when he wants to.

She collapses onto the couch, pulling the throw blanket around her shoulders like a suit of armor. Strand pauses, seemingly to ponder over where to sit, before he goes for the spot next to her. She’d been hoping he’d go for the easy chair on the other side of the coffee table.

His sweatpants swish as his leg presses against the tight denim covering hers. The heat of his hand burns her through the jeans as he rests it on her thigh.

“So,” he says in that irritatingly knowing way of his, and she’s about to ask him if he also hears the jackhammering of construction outside when she realizes it’s her heart pounding in her throat and ears.

Then the tidal wave of wanting hits her square in the face, knocking the wind out of her and pulling her under the surface. She yanks him down with a fistful of Mariners shirt and kisses him long and hard, gulping in the sense of safety his presence offers. She knows she’s fucked: she loves him. For months she’s prioritized his welfare above her own, has craved his company like an addict. It’s a fact as inevitable and unchangeable as gravity or conservation of mass, as true as those laws of science Strand holds sacred.

He tears the Mariners shirt off, maybe in the indignant protestation of a Cubs fan, before she pulls him back into the sea, murmuring a siren’s song she imagines him too eager to avoid.

Her parents will like him even less than the last one. Too bad she hopes Strand _is_ her last one.

The shrill ringing of the oven timer pulls her out of her inebriated state. She shoves Strand away and plows past him to the kitchen. She shuts off the timer, glad Amalia isn’t here today (she’s taken to spending more and more nights at Nic’s, as far as Alex can tell).

With a precision that would make her mother proud, she presses down on the French press, filtering out the coffee grounds from the godsend of the morning, freshly brewed hazelnut coffee. It’s one of the best parts of living in Seattle. Even cheap beans somehow taste as good as the gourmet stuff.

She coughs as she spots him shirtless and leaning against the door frame.

“Coffee?”

Strand feigns cleaning his glasses on the edge of his sweatpants, somehow shy under her gaze.

“Please.” It’s overly polite, and it sits uneasy next to his anger from not ten hours ago.

Wordlessly she opens the fridge and reaches for the milk, topping Strand’s off with a teaspoon or two so it blends into a warm amber tone. Hers she leaves black.

She takes a long sip of coffee as she offers Strand his own. His fingertips brush against hers as he accepts the mug, and she averts her eyes.

Oh, she’s so fucked.

“Alex,” he murmurs, placing a soft hand on her shoulder, and it’s too tender, somehow more intimate than any way he touched her the previous evening. She’s torn between her desire to melt into him and the urge to tear away. It feels wrong, but she wants and wants.

Logic wins the day, so she pulls back from him, annoyed at the stern frown on his features.

“Look, I recognize that this partner—this _friendship_ has been confusing at times—”

“We’re not friends and you fucking know it,” she counters, aiming her verbal punch straight to the sternum.

He catches it with a pained expression, and she’s simultaneously gratified and distressed that she’s upset him.

Strand sighs that patronizing sigh again, and she wonders why the hell she fell so hard for someone like him.

Her father, the less pragmatic of her parents, the hopeless romantic, had once told her something she’d always held onto, kept locked in a dusty hope chest in the back of her heart: “You can’t help who you love. You just do.”

(It might explain the stark personality contrast between the hard-nosed nature of her mother and the gentle pliability of her father, on further thought.)

“I’ve been preoccupied,” Strand says, and it’s a poor excuse, but she supposes she understands. Imagine discovering that your dead spouse isn’t dead, that a shady corporation has been pulling the strings behind all that you’ve worked so hard for, that something your absent father obsessed over will drag your life down with it, even after his death.

Of course she understands. She doesn’t have to like it, though.

“I’ve _needed_ you,” she admits, and it’s too much vulnerability exposed, uttered from her mouth before her exhausted mind can censor her words. It’s the truth, hideous in its nakedness. She feels worthless and lost, needing to rely on a mere _man_ for sanity and security. She’s not as strong as she wishes. But she’s still surviving off a reserve of sheer willpower, has been for months of sleeplessness and terror.

“I think you have needed someone as well,” she ventures further, toeing the water. She finds it lukewarm. She could get used to it quickly if she jumps in all at once.

He sets his mug down.

“Maybe,” comes his reply, voice breaking on the second syllable, and she can see the distress rolling off his shoulders like a rock slide, violent and loud until he breaks.

Embracing his too-large body is mere instinct.

“I love you,” she whispers into his ear, and she hears him choke back the overwhelming emotions.

She’s absolutely fucked: he’s a natural disaster, and she’s a storm chaser caught in his wake.

She welcomes the destruction, at the mercy of the elements.

**Author's Note:**

> I recognize that there are some consistency issues from Natural Disaster to this piece... Let's just say Alex couldn't sleep and laid out some clothes for Strand in the hopes that seeing him clothed the next morning would lessen her urge to freak out. And all she had in his size were the Mariners shirt and the sweatpants.


End file.
